. There are indestructible elements in the race of
man--"organic filaments" he calls them--which bind society together, and
which ensure a future for the race after any past, however lamentable.
Those "organic filaments" are Carlyle's idea of Social Reality--the real
things which survive all revolution. There are four such realities which
ensure the future for society even when it seems extinct.

First, there is the fact of man's brotherhood to man--a fact quite
independent of man's willingness to acknowledge that brotherhood.
Second, there is the common bond of tradition, and all our debt to the
past, which is a fact equally independent of our willingness to
acknowledge it. Third, there is the natural and inevitable fact of man's
necessity for reverencing some one above him. Obedience and reverence
are forthcoming, whenever man is in the presence of what he _ought_ to
reverence, and so hero-worship is secure.

These three bonds of social reality are inseparable from one another.
The first, the brotherhood of man, has often been used as the watchword
of a false independence. It is only possible on the condition of
reverence and obedience for that which is higher than oneself, either in
the past or the present. "Suspicion of 'Servility,' of reverence for
Superiors, the very dog-leech is anxious to disavow. Fools! Were your
Superiors worthy to govern, and you worthy to obey, reverence for them
were even your only possible freedom." These three, then, are the social
realities, and all other social distinctions and conventionalities are
but clothes, to be replaced or thrown away at need.

But there is a fourth bond of social reality--the greatest and most
powerful of all. That reality is Religion. Here, too, we must
distinguish clothes from that which they cover--forms of religion from
religion itself. Church-clothes, indeed, are as necessary as any other
clothes, and they will harm no one who remembers that they are but
clothes, and distinguishes between faith and form. The old forms are
already being discarded, yet Religion is so vital that it will always
find new forms for itself, suited to the new age. For religion, in one
form or in another, is absolutely essential to society; and, being a
grand reality, will continue to keep society from collapse.

4. From this we pass naturally to the great and final doctrine in which
the philosophy of clothes is expounded. That doctrine, condensed into a
single sentence, is that